Lewis Hamilton. Sebastian Vettel. Nico Rosberg. Charles Leclerc. Jules Bianchi. Nico Hülkenberg. George Russell. Valtteri Bottas. Alex Albon. Romain Grosjean. Stoffel Vandoorne. Pastor Maldonado.
Together, these current and former Formula 1 drivers have amassed 12 F1 Drivers’ Championships and a Formula E Championship, in addition to wins in the Indy 500, 24 Hours of Le Mans and countless other races across various series.
But beyond their successes, something they all have in common is a shared history with one man: current Ferrari team principal, Frédéric Vasseur.
Vasseur and the team that he helped to establish nurtured each of them throughout their junior careers. It was vital support as they were just starting to climb the ranks of motorsports, long before they established themselves in top-tier racing series and before any one of those major titles and wins came to be.
But how exactly did one man become this successful at finding and mentoring such a strong roster of drivers throughout his career? Surely, the answer isn’t magic… right?
Identifying motorsport talent isn't an exact science
"He has always had a good talent for identifying the best young drivers,” said Frédéric 'Fifo' Guyot in an exclusive 2024 interview with GP Fans. “Many times, we got the best driver we could have.”
The two worked together at ART Grand Prix, a GP2 and GP3 team (the predecessors to what are now F2 and F3, respectively) that Vasseur himself founded alongside Nicolas Todt. Guyot was the GP2 race engineer for none other than Hamilton himself, a GP2 Championship winner with the team in 2006 and one of several drivers who not only had a successful junior career under Vasseur, but also went on to have great careers in F1.
With how many talented drivers he has molded over the years, one would think that Vasseur finds it an easy task to pick out the diamonds in the rough. Yet when asked about this by Beyond the Grid host Tom Clarkson, Vasseur humbly replied, “Honestly not. [It] would be very easy to say yes, but honestly not.
“Sometimes it's quite obvious–like Lewis–but you never know what could happen… It's not a guarantee because you are over-dominating the junior series that you will do it [in F1].”
But while nothing is guaranteed, Vasseur knows the qualities that all successful F1 drivers have, and that makes younger drivers much more likely to keep thriving through later stages in their careers.
The traits Fred Vasseur looks for in a driver
“A driver is not only about performance, but about being capable of leading a team,” he said during a 2016 interview, shortly after taking on his first role in F1 as team principal of the then-brand-new Renault Sport Formula One Team. “Right now we have more or less a thousand people in the team, if you take Viry and Enstone together, and that needs some sort of emotional leadership - and that is the job for a driver! We need a driver who is super-motivated and able to super-motivate everybody else.”
This leadership can take multiple forms, as Vasseur recollected on that same episode of Beyond the Grid. From Vettel taking it upon himself to learn French before joining ART so that he could better communicate with his engineers and the rest of the team, to multiple drivers such as Hamilton, Leclerc and others taking accountability for poor performances, Vasseur values someone who goes above and beyond what is expected.
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But more than anything, it is resilience and motivation to keep improving that sets apart the truly exceptional, in Vasseur’s eyes.
“When you are winning, it's always easy,” he said to Clarkson during a conversation about Hülkenberg in particular. “When you have a season that you start with poles, wins, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you are Champion quite easily. Okay, you did the job.
“But when you start a season at the back with issues, and you are able, step by step, to recover, to keep the team motivated, to keep the guys pushing in the same direction, and sometimes to even be stronger than your boss when he's a bit desperate, I think this guy is a real leader.”
This is a quality that Vasseur continues to demand of his drivers today.
“I would be destroyed if I had the drivers telling me that we are doing a good job,” he commented to the media ahead of last year’s season finale in Abu Dhabi.
At the time, he was speaking about the criticism Ferrari had faced last year, both internally and externally, but the message remains the same. To Vasseur, a good driver, a good leader, is one who continuously pushes their team forward.
“I’m not shocked at all when [Leclerc and Hamilton] are coming to me and saying ‘We have to improve on this, this, this’, because it’s what we are asking them to do,” he said.
It's a philosophy that has served Vasseur well for three and a half decades. Drivers who came through his junior teams won every F1 Drivers' Championship from 2010 to 2020, and the most decorated of them, Hamilton, has now reunited with Vasseur at Ferrari, two decades after ART Racing backed him to the 2006 GP2 title. Yet ask him for his secret, and Vasseur’s answer hasn't changed in all that time.
“In the same way, we are trying to push them on the limit, to push them on the driving,” he said. “I saw that it’s like this [over] the last 35 years. There is nothing magic.”
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